Media & IQ
Twenty years ago, a political philosopher named James Flynn uncovered a curious fact. Americans — at least, as measured by I.Q. tests — were getting smarter. This fact had been obscured for years, because the people who give I.Q. tests continually recalibrate the scoring system to keep the average at 100. But if you took out the recalibration, Flynn found, I.Q. scores showed a steady upward trajectory, rising by about three points per decade, which means that a person whose I.Q. placed him in the top ten per cent of the American population in 1920 would today fall in the bottom third. Some of that effect, no doubt, is a simple by-product of economic progress: in the surge of prosperity during the middle part of the last century, people in the West became better fed, better educated, and more familiar with things like I.Q. tests. But, even as that wave of change has subsided, test scores have continued to rise — not just in America but all over the developed world. What’s more, the increases have not been confined to children who go to enriched day-care centers and private schools. The middle part of the curve — the people who have supposedly been suffering from a deteriorating public-school system and a steady diet of lowest-common-denominator television and mindless pop music — has increased just as much. In Everything Bad Is Good for You, Steven Johnson proposes that what is making us smarter is precisely what we thought was making us dumber: popular culture.
Television is very different now from what it was thirty years ago. A typical episode of “Starsky and Hutch,” in the nineteen-seventies, followed an essentially linear path: two characters, engaged in a single story line, moving toward a decisive conclusion. To watch an episode of “Dallas” today is to be stunned by its glacial pace — by the arduous attempts to establish social relationships, by the excruciating simplicity of the plotline, by how obvious it was. A single episode of “The Sopranos,” by contrast, might follow five narrative threads, involving a dozen characters who weave in and out of the plot. The extraordinary amount of money now being made in the television aftermarket — DVD sales and syndication — means that the creators of television shows now have an incentive to make programming that can sustain two or three or four viewings.
Twenty years ago, video games like Tetris or Pac-Man were simple exercises in motor coördination and pattern recognition. Johnson points out that one of the “walk-throughs” for “Grand Theft Auto III” — that is, the informal guides that break down the games and help players navigate their complexities — is fifty-three thousand words long, about the length of his book.
Video games don’t have a set of unambiguous rules that have to be learned and then followed during the course of play. We have to figure out what to do. These games withhold critical information from the player. Players have to explore and sort through hypotheses in order to make sense of the game’s environment, which is why a modern video game can take forty hours to complete.
Players are required to manage a dizzying array of information and options. The game presents the player with a series of puzzles, and you can’t succeed at the game simply by solving the puzzles one at a time. You have to craft a longer-term strategy, in order to juggle and coördinate competing interests.
Johnson imagines what cultural critics might have said had video games been invented hundreds of years ago, and only recently had something called the book been marketed aggressively to children: Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying — which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical sound-scapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements — books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion — you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one.
When you read a biology textbook, the content of what you read is what matters. When you play a video game, the value is in how it makes you think.
Being “smart” involves the kind of fluid problem solving that matters in things like video games and I.Q. tests, but also the kind of crystallized knowledge that comes from explicit learning. When it comes to the latter kind of intelligence, it is not clear at all what kind of progress we are making, as anyone who has read, say, the Gettysburg Address alongside any presidential speech from the past twenty years can attest.
“Brain Candy,” by Malcolm Gladwell